The Electric Slide is a four-wall line dance that Maxine recognizes from the many bar mitzvahs gone blurring by since the old Paradise Garage of her teen years and the only fraction of the week really that mattered, Saturday nights when she would sneak out of the house at one or one-thirty, take the subway down to Houston and the endless, endless block to King, teleport in past the bouncers to rejoin for a while the other core Garageheads, and dance all night in the conjured world, and wait till breakfast at some diner to try to figure out what kind of a story to tell her parents this time… and next thing you’re in your purse looking for tissues because it’s all gone, of course, another of those expulsions on out into a colder season, where not everybody made it through, there was AIDS and crack and let’s not forget late fuckin capitalism, so only a few really found refuge of any kind…
“Um, Maxine, are you…?”
“Yes. No. I’m good… what?”
Eric gestures with his head, and there among the Art Nouveau intricacies of the floor, in the middle of the formation, Maxine spots the elusive potential homicide accomplice Felix Boïngueaux, wearing a double-knit disco-era suit in some screamingly saturated coral, almost certainly picked up on sale, a store buyer’s impulse soon regretted, over a T-shirt with a Canadian maple-leaf logo and THE EH? TEAM on it. The dance formation reformats into couples, and Felix comes over, sweating and jittery.
“Yo, Felix, ça va?”
“Bummer about Lester, eh?” Unblinking chutzpah-heavy eye contact.
“This is what you wanted to see me about, Felix?”
“I was out of town when it happened.”
“Did I say anything? Even if Lester did seem, well, under the impression you had his back.”
Chances of rattling this customer are about as fat as Ally McBeal. “You’re still following the case, then.”
“We’re keeping a file open on it.” The investigatorial “we.” Let him think there’s a third party who’s hired her. “Anything you can help us with?”
“Maybe. Maybe you’d just go runnin to tell the cops or something.”
“I’m not a cop lover, Felix, that’s Nancy Drew, actually not too flattering a comparison, you need to work on that.”
“Hey, you’re the one who tried to get the ol’ Vipster popped,” Felix meantime having begun to squint suspiciously at Eric, who withdraws amiably enough into the ebb and flow of dancers, drinkers, and dopers.
She pretends to sigh. “It’s about the poutine isn’t it, you’ll never forgive me, once again, Felix, I’m sorry I said that—dumb remark, cheap shot.”
Going along with it, “In Montreal it’s a diagnostic for moral character—if somebody resists poutine, they resist life.”
“Can I think about,” having a look around at the partying, “that later? Monday? I promise.”
“Look, look, it’s Gabriel Ice.” Nodding in the direction of the bar, where sure enough their gracious host stands, expressing himself to a small knot of admirers.
“Ever meet him?”
She understands that this may’ve been the whole point. “We’ve talked on the phone. I got a sense that his time is precious to him.”
“Come on, I’ll introduce you, we’ve been doing a little business together.”
Of course you have, bitch. They sidle across the teeming square footage till they’re in earshot of the trim tycoon, who is not so much chatting as delivering some kind of sales pitch.
His eyes, framed by Oliver Peoples horn-rims, are less expressive than many Maxine has noted at the fish market, though sometimes a party who may appear immune to desire is in fact oversusceptible, dangerously so, no least idea of how to deal with it once it jumps the fence, as it must, and heads for the ridgeline. Thin and careful lips. In the business you run into far too many of these faces, don’t know what they want, or how much of it, or what to do with it once they have it.
“More and more servers together in the same place putting out levels of heat that quickly become problematic unless you spend the budget on A/C. Thing to do,” Ice proclaims, “is to go north, set up server farms where heat dissipation won’t be so much of a problem, take your power from renewables like hydro or sunlight, use surplus heat to help sustain whatever communities grow up around the data centers. Domed communities across the Arctic tundra.
“My geek brothers! the tropics may be OK for cheap labor and sex tours, but the future is out there on the permafrost, a new geopolitical imperative—gain control of the supply of cold as a natural resource of incomputable worth, with global warming, even more crucial—”
There is something creepily familiar about this go-north argument. By a corollary of Godwin’s law valid only on the Upper West Side, Stalin’s name, like Hitler’s, is 100% certain to enter a discussion of any length, and Maxine now recalls Ernie telling her about the genocidal Georgian and his plans back in the 1930s for colonizing the Arctic with domed cities and armies of young technicians, otherwise known, Ernie was always careful to point out, as forced labor, bringing out for multimedia emphasis his 78rpm album of The Attractive Schoolgirl of Zazhopinsk, an obscure opera from the purge era, strangled Russian bass-tenor duets invoking steppes of ice, thermodynamic night. And now here’s Gabriel Ice, in a capitalist party mask, with a neo-Stalinist rerun.
Aah, God help us, how sleazy is it, and how has it come to this? a rented palace, a denial of the passage of time, a mogul on the black-diamond slopes of the IT sector thinks he’s a rock star. It isn’t so much that Maxine can’t be fooled, it’s more that she hates to be, and when she finds anybody trying too hard to fool her, she reaches for her revolver. Or in this case, turns and heads for the stairs, leaving Felix and Gabriel Ice to shmooze as they will, rogue to rogue.
Does Nora Charles ever have to put up with this sort of thing? Even Nancy Drew? The parties they go to, it’s all catered hors d’oeuvres and beautiful strangers. But let Maxine try to step out and enjoy herself a little, forget it, it always ends up like this. Weekday-type obligations, guilt, ghosts.
For some reason, however, she manages to stay all night and close the joint down. Horst, perhaps from secondhand smoke, regressing to his old party-animal ways, is affably all over the place. Maxine finds herself tangled in and presently refereeing nerd disputes she can’t understand a word of. She nods out in the toilet once or twice, and if she dreams at all, it’s hard to separate from the great invisible wheeling around her, decelerating, board-fading to all-but-silent black and white, till it’s time at last to CD tilde home. For recessional music there’s “Closing Time” by Semisonic, a four-chord farewell to the old century. Former and future nerdistocracy slowly, and to look at them you’d think reluctantly, filtering back out into the street, into the long September which has been with them in a virtual way since spring before last, continuing only to deepen. Putting their street faces back on for it. Faces already under silent assault, as if by something ahead, some Y2K of the workweek that no one is quite imagining, the crowds drifting slowly out into the little legendary streets, the highs beginning to dissipate, out into the casting-off of veils before the luminosities of dawn, a sea of T-shirts nobody’s reading, a clamor of messages nobody’s getting, as if it’s the true text history of nights in the Alley, outcries to be attended to and not be lost, the 3:00 AM kozmo deliveries to code sessions and all-night shredding parties, the bedfellows who came and went, the bands in the clubs, the songs whose hooks still wait to ambush an idle hour, the day jobs with meetings about meetings and bosses without clue, the unreal strings of zeros, the business models changing one minute to the next, the start-up parties every night of the week and more on Thursdays than you could keep track of, which of these faces so claimed by the time, the epoch whose end they’ve been celebrating all night—which of them can see ahead, among the microclimates of binary, tracking earthwide everywhere through dark fiber and twisted pairs and nowadays wirelessly through spaces private and public, anywhere among cybersweatshop needles flashing and never still, in that unquiet vastly stitched and unstitched tapestry they have all at some time sat growing crippled in the service of—to the shape of the day imminent, a procedure waiting execution, about to be revealed, a search result with no instructions on how to look for it?